Article ID: CBB761659724

Ateleological propagation in Goethe’s Metamorphosis of plants (2021)

unapi

It was commonly accepted in Goethe’s time that plants were equipped both to propagate themselves and to play a certain role in the natural economy as a result of God’s beneficent and providential design. Goethe’s identification of sexual propagation as the “summit of nature” in The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) might suggest that he, too, drew strongly from this theological-metaphysical tradition that had given rise to Christian Wolff’s science of teleology. Goethe, however, portrayed nature as inherently active and propagative, itself improvising into the future by multiple means, with no extrinsically pre-ordained goal or fixed end-point. Rooted in the nature philosophy of his friend and mentor Herder, Goethe’s plants exhibit their own historically and environmentally conditioned drives and directionality in The Metamorphosis of Plants. In this paper I argue that conceiving of nature as active productivity—not merely a passive product—freed Goethe of the need to tie plants’ forms and functions to a divine system of ends, and allowed him to consider possibilities for plants, and for nature, beyond the walls of teleology.

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Authors & Contributors
Anderson, Gemma
Anstey, Peter
Bianchi, Silvia De
Clode, Danielle
Coppola, Al
Funk, Holger
Journals
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Archives of Natural History
Bruniana & Campanelliana: Ricerche Filosofiche e Materiali Storico-testuali
Comptes Rendus Biologies
Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation
HOPOS
Publishers
Johannes M. Mayer
Kluwer Academic Publishers
MIT Press
Oxford University Press
Picador
University of Chicago Press
Concepts
Botany
Philosophy of science
Teleology
Morphology
Biology
Natural philosophy
People
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
Kant, Immanuel
Aristotle
Bassi, Laura Maria Caterina
Beuys, Joseph
Cesi, Federico
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
17th century
20th century
16th century
Renaissance
Places
Germany
Bohemia
Australia
Italy
Institutions
Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Rome)
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